


and so the shepherd leads

by thedevilbites



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Angst, Armistice be hurting bad, Armistice finds out, Armistice knows some serious shit, F/M, Features The Man in Black's knife heavily, Happy Ending, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied Sexual Content, Light Dom/sub, Light Masochism (kinda?), Light Sadism, Mild Sexual Content, Pain, Sociopath vibes, Tears, The Man in Black ain't helping too much, The Man in Black is kinda an asshole, all those deep feels, because we all know he loves that thing, but they work through it, i guess, or do they...?, plot if you squint, potentially pointless interactions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:14:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23153827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilbites/pseuds/thedevilbites
Summary: She’s too tired to care.
Relationships: Armistice/The Man in Black
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	and so the shepherd leads

**Author's Note:**

> i watched the first couple episodes of Westworld and then switched to frantically trying to find Armistice/The Man in Black fanfiction.
> 
> it do be like that sometimes.

He leads her to a place way beyond Mariposa, where the craggy, red-rimmed rocks grow taller and taller around them, layered mountains of muggy brown and vivid sun-burnt orange below a sun so bright she has to squint her eyes even as she turns her gaze to the ground.

She’s scoured these desert plains since she was a little kid, knows every nook and cranny hidden far and wide amongst the rocks, and yet she does not know where they are going. That being said, this terrain is unfamiliar, and she fights the coil of unease in the pit of her stomach by soaking in as much as she can; how the sky grows clearer, the ground grows softer and cooler, and the dense shrubbery that she has known from birth blooms into plants she has never seen before, but can suddenly list all by name as if she knew them all her life. 

She passes mint-green Curve Leaf Yuccas with needle-fine tips, carefully inspects the twisting, creaking Creosote Bushes, and the towering Desert Ironwood that quiver in the wind with branches that settle just above her head. Turpentine Broomsm. Ocotillos. Desert Willows. And, when the sun finally sets and the night brings a blessed cool that gleams over her skin like a balm, notices the Yellow Paloverdes and the Mesquite Trees and the Bougainvillea. 

(She sees. She _remembers_ , even if she doesn’t know it yet. 

The shrubbery is only the beginning.)

When they finally stop, Armistice—too tired to take a swig from her canteen, or put on her hefty deer skin coat to fight off the mosquitoes that thrive in the cold—collapses onto the dirt, supine, head lolling back to see the glistening stars.

The Man in Black materializes by her side, appearing out of thin air, as he often does, when she was sure she saw him standing a couple feet away from her. If you were looking right at him, Armistice thinks, you’d see how he does it. How he _moves_ , all soft and silent. How he sneaks up on you. 

The problem is that no one ever _looks_ , really. Brief, terrified glances, maybe a short peak out of the corner of their eye and hope to God he doesn’t make eye contact. 

Fear is the great oppressor, Armistice has always thought, and she doesn’t want anyone (neither fear, nor men, not even the Gods) to rule her, so she tips her head lazily to the side, and looks directly at her guide, gaze steel, unwavering.

“What are we doing here?” She murmurs, hoarse, voice coming out softer than she intended.

The Man in Black opens his mouth to answer, but then he smiles, low and dark and threatening, and any mask of bravado she hoped to hide behind slips through her fingers like smoke.

She swallows. 

And then his smile deepens, and he tells her everything. 

__

When she finally remembers, she laughs so hard she’s doubling over, mouth splitting too wide at the corners as she slaps the dirt ground with her hand. Her fingers dig into the soil, rocks scrape her calloused flesh, but she doesn’t care.

Armistice only realizes she’s crying when she feels his fingers rubbing at her cheeks, caressing the wet streaks that line her face. She looks at him, how he lies next to her, inspecting her face as if he can find a buried treasure written in the creases of her forehead. 

He is warm against her, solid. He smells of smoke and pine and he’s so so—

She shudders.

The wind rages on. She looks away when he glances down to meet her eyes, hides her face in the jungle of her tangled hair so he can’t see her expression.

So he can’t see that he broke her, _they_ broke her, and she’s dying inside. 

__

Some things come back, drift slowly from the recesses of her mind and settle before her eyes like dry leaves in the fall. 

And she’s left in pieces.

Every time a new memory reaches the surface she’s left gasping, heaving, panting, _choking_ because it’s all too much and she refuses to remember her past, to acknowledge the truth, to understand and realize and know and _ponder the implications_ : what it means that she isn’t really alive. 

And that’s just it, really. She isn’t alive. 

She’s fake. 

Synthetic. 

Artificial. 

A low-grade replica of the real thing, a toy created for some fucked up system that propagates off of the misery of others, and the wealth of even more and there’s nothing, _totally completely absolutely nothing_ , she can do to stop it. Stop any of it. The rape. The pillage. The plunder. The rich fucking men—they are corrupted and perverted and insolent and contumelious and so so fucking arrogant—that come to play God and get off on their depraved little fantasies while their plastic, malleable housewives are stuck at home with the children. 

It rouses something deep and primal within her when she thinks about it. Reality.

_This is her reality now._

There’s a frantic stirring in her throat, as if there’s a woodpecker stuffed deep down there and it’s pecking relentlessly at the soft, pink flesh that lines her esophagus.

She feels raw. Heavy.

_Peck._

Abject horror.

_Peck._

Humiliation.

 _Peck._ (More viscous now, its movements lightning-quick and angry.)

Rage. So much rage.

 _Peck._ (There’s blood leaking down her throat, surely that’s what that feeling is, a warm oozing sludge, like bitter slimy bile but different somehow, thicker and sharper.)

She feels _full_ , like she’s been waiting a lifetime to feel this way but now it’s as if she’s stuffed to the brim with something that’s unnatural and odd and she wants it out of her body, wants that stupid bird to stutter and twitch and suffocate in her throat, wants it to die right this very instant—

_Peck._

Some things come back, and others do not. 

—

Innocence. Naivety. 

Sanity. 

There are the things that do not come back.  


—

After a while, she starts to notice. See how he glances at her out of the corner of his eye, tongue darting out to wet his lips when her coat rucks up to reveal a layer of skin. 

Catches him tracing patterns on her body with his eyes, fingers twitching against the rock he sits on, as if he longs to touch what isn’t his. 

But, she’s lonely. And broken. And starving. And full.

There’s an ache so deep inside of her she can feel it shift and slither inside her bones, inside her very marrow. 

He could have her, that she knows. He could throw her on the ground and rip her clothes off and palm and squeeze and tease his way with her. He could. He can, and maybe that’s what makes her do it. 

The realization that it’s almost as if he is waiting for her. 

She seeks him out when the stars are high in the sky, grinning down at her expectantly from their perch, as if they know something she doesn’t. 

He’s standing, one arm hanging loose at his side, the other fingering the hilt of his knife. The wind gently rustles the underbrush that grows among the age-old rocks around them. It’s secluded. Peaceful. 

From this angle, with his black hat tipped up to the sky in what can only be an appreciative gesture, Armistice thinks The Man in Black looks real. Real and vulnerable and painfully human. 

(She is wrong, of course. About this, and so much more.)

He turns around when she approaches, swivels on his heel and Armistice is left with no other choice but to look at him.

There’s a sort of...blackness in his eyes, a darkness she can’t quite pinpoint, but knows is there.

She slips her leather shirt off of her body, refuses to look away as it falls to her feet. The rest of her clothes soon follow.

A shiver crawls up her spine, but it isn’t from the cold, nor from any sort of pleasure. It’s an odd, disquieting feeling, as if millions of spiders were scurrying up her back, the tiny hairs— _trichobothria_ , this she can remember—snagging onto her skin as they go. 

His eyes shift to her stare at her cheek, slide down her neck, shoulder, lingering on her breasts, the blush-rose pink of her nipples, then dipping to her hip and lower, lower still, eyes hooded as he drinks her in, all of which he could not get to when he first saw her bathing in the river, a dark goddess with the snake tattoo.

When his eyes suddenly light up, and he steps towards her, she falls into his arms. She knows he will catch her. 

Warmth pressed against her sensitive breasts, making her gasp, arch into him, now at her back, her neck, encompassing and consuming and _attacking_ her. Steady arms support her weight. Muscled, strong.

She squeezes her eyes shut and presses her face into his neck so she doesn’t have to watch, so all she can do is _feel_. 

So she can bite into the junction of his shoulder and scream when he brings his knife out.

—

She dreams of The Man in Black crouching over her, his hands holding her down and then, just as quickly, slipping underneath her shoulders to lift her off of the ground to bring her closer to him.

And then he’s licking a long line across her neck, sliding his mouth down to explore her stomach, tongue scratchy and at the same time smooth and wet, so precise against her skin. 

She’s shaking she’s basking she’s _throbbing_ under his attention, underneath the bloody line he carved into her stomach; a stinging, hideously red snake overlaying her own tattoo.

Her skin hurts. It _burns_.

She’s too tired to care.

—

When she wakes up, she’s lying flat on the mottled earth. She yanks her shirt up, smooths her fingers over the flat plane of her pale stomach.

Her hands find something bumpy and rough, Armistice hisses when she pushes her fingers into her flesh, pain blooming underneath her touch. She inches her fingers upwards, skimming her hand underneath her breasts, finds more raised lines. 

Then, suddenly: realization. 

She didn’t restart on her loop.

And there are scars on her body. 

_Scars_.

Scars from last night, from his touch and his anger and his pain all wrapped into one.

Which means that they didn’t touch her. They didn’t fix her. 

( _He_ touched her. _He_ fixed her.)

For the first time in what feels like forever, Armistice smiles. It feels good. It feels _right_. It feels like her whole miserable life is washing away before her eyes, and it’s the best fucking feeling in the entire world.

—

“I’m free, aren’t I?” 

The Man in Black’s answering grin makes her blood run cold, the fine hairs on the nape of neck stand on end, and her knees go weak, all shaky and watery-like.

Her throat seizes up. Blinks through the alarm bells going off in her head, the red fog clouding her vision.

”You’ve finally figured it out, sweetness.” He pauses, cocks his head to the side, “Never thought you’d get here.” His voice is low and raspy, too-soft. 

“Don’t lie to me.” She peers up at him through her hair, catches his gaze as she brushes her blonde tresses aside. “I’ve had more than enough lies for a lifetime.”

Her hands are clenched into fists at her side, nails tearing into the sensitive flesh. He looks her up and down slowly, sensually, a hint of a smile at his lips. His eyes are glittering.

“Why don’t you come with me.” It isn’t a question, and he doesn’t phrase it like one.

Armistice opens her mouth to reply, closes it, opens it again. She knows what he’s really asking. What he really wants to show her.

She watches as his fingers slide a slow path to the hilt of his knife, breath stuck in her chest. She watches him trail his eyes down her body.

She reaches for his hand.

_These violent delights have violent ends, don’t they?_

**Author's Note:**

> ok hope you enjoyed because i certainly did!
> 
> ;)


End file.
